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It is a picture of joy and jubilation. Rosa-Linda Demore-Brown, an
enormous smile lighting up her face, holds out her arms to embrace
Roberta Kitchen, who is rushing toward her in a blur of elation and
relief.

The picture of the two black women, who are members of Cleveland
Parents for School Choice, was taken by Associated Press photographer
Ron Schwane on the day the Supreme Court issued its landmark decision
upholding the constitutionality of the Ohio school voucher program. It
appeared the following day in newspapers around the country, including
The Washington Post, which ran it across three columns on Page 1. As
well it should have, for Demore-Brown and Kitchen exemplify the struggle
for black civil rights at the start of the 21st century.

Republicans and conservatives were latecomers to the civil rights
movement in the 1950s and 1960s, and they have paid the political price
for their tardiness. To this day, the great majority of blacks vote
Democratic and black electoral clout is invariably leveraged to advance
liberal political goals. But the civil-rights battleground has changed
from the era when Jim Crow and racist sheriffs were the enemy. Today
there is no struggle in which more is at stake for black America than
the struggle for school choice. And this time it is not Republicans and
conservatives who are on the wrong side of the fight.

No one is more victimized by the failures of America's
government-run school system than the children of the urban poor, and
those children are usually black. Stuck disproportionately in schools
that don't work, blocked from the escape hatch of private or parochial
school, black children routinely perform far below average in every
subject. Sixty-three percent of black 4th-graders, for example, cannot
read. The average black high school senior is about as well educated as
the average white middle school student. There are many ways to ruin
someone's life, but few are as effective as ignorance. And ignorance,
by and large, is what public schooling guarantees for children from
America's poorest and blackest neighborhoods.

Most American parents take school choice for granted. They either
choose to live in neighborhoods with decent public schools or they
choose to shoulder the financial sacrifice of paying for private school.
Among those who know the government schools best -- the men and women
who teach in them -- large numbers choose something better for their own
kids. In Chicago and Philadelphia, 36 percent of public school teachers
enroll their children in private schools. In Cleveland, 38 percent do.
In Boston, 45 percent.

The idea behind vouchers is uncomplicated: to extend the power of
choice to parents who would otherwise have none and thereby dignify
their children with the equality to which they are entitled as
Americans. If anyone should be avid for vouchers, it is liberals and
Democrats, who trumpet their concern for the poor and who claim to care
deeply about civil rights. And yet it is liberals and Democrats who
most vehemently inveigh against vouchers. The reason, of course, is
that teachers unions want to crush school choice -- like all monopolies,
they detest competition -- and what the politically powerful teachers
unions want, the left generally tries to give them.

There are a few honorable exceptions. The Rev. Floyd Flake, a
prominent New York pastor and former Democratic member of Congress, is a
passionate supporter of school choice. Andrew Young, the former Atlanta
mayor, is another voucher supporter. So is Joseph Califano, who was
Jimmy Carter's secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare.

For a while, the most prominent honorable exception was former Labor
Secretary Robert Reich, who created a great stir when he came out in
favor of vouchers in 2000. At the time, he promoted them as a "sane
approach to giving poor kids a better education." No longer. Today
Reich is running for governor of Massachusetts, and he has recanted his
support for vouchers. For him as for most Democratic politicians, it is
more important to genuflect to the teachers unions than to rescue black
children from lousy public schools.

Rosa-Linda Demore-Brown, Roberta Kitchen, and countless parents like
them are as desperate as black parents in Topeka and Little Rock were a
half-century ago. Back then it was segregationist governors who stood
in schoolhouse doorways and vowed to keep black kids trapped in wretched
schools. Today it is liberals and Democrats who stop at nothing to
preserve educational inequality.

By contrast, it is conservatives and Republicans who have become the
new civil rights champions, taking on all comers in the battle for
school choice. What the NAACP and the ACLU were in the 1950s, the
Institute for Justice and the Landmark Legal Foundation are today -- the
defenders of the weak and the discriminated-against, who find racial
injustice unbearable and are resolved to make it right.

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